I ended up returning the refurbished iPod I bought. It was supposed to have a one year warranty, but Apple wouldn’t honor it. Hrmf. The main reason I wanted that particular older model is that new iPods require iTunes 7.4 or above. iTunes 7.4 and above require service pack 2 if you’re using WinXP. I don’t have service pack 2, and I have no intentions of getting it. Hrmf again.
What to do? As much as I’m not an Apple fan, the iPod Classic seems to be the sweet spot, in terms of providing a large amount of storage for a reasonable price. But, if it won’t work with my set-up, then I’m screwed.
I spent a couple of days thinking over my options and reading up on possible solutions to the iTunes-SP2 problem. I found several programs that came close, but nothing that was guaranteed to work. Some of the work-arounds were convoluted enough that I didn’t even want to try them. I was not a happy camper!
And then I found Songbird.
Songbird is open source, so it’s sort of like Thunderbird for your iPod. It installs easily (seriously, it’s 100% foolproof). It can pull music from your iTunes folder, if you have one, or it can automagically search for music on your drive(s), or you can manually add selected songs. It can play audio files and streaming audio. Other than that, it’s pretty basic. It does not (yet) rip or burn CDs, so you’d have to use another program for that. (There are approximately eleventy brazillion free ripping and burning programs out there.) Video playback is also supposedly forthcoming.
The user interface is basic, as well. It supports multiple tag editing (as far as I could tell, iTunes 6x did not) and playlist creation. I have not found an easy way to check/uncheck which songs to include/exclude when syncing (one thing iTunes did manage to get right), but there is an “add manually” option when syncing that might fulfill the same function. You could also create an iPod playlist, and export just those songs. My solution is to remove everything I don’t want on my iPod from the Songbird library. Since I’m using an old version of MusicMatch Jukebox to manage my real library, the “master library” is unaffected.
Anyway, I’m happy to report that Songbird does, indeed, sync beautifully with the iPod Classic. It took about 14 forevers to transfer everything to the iPod, but it did so without any problems. I give it 11 stars out of 10 for A) solving my headache and B) freeing me from Teh Eeevil iTunes.
And now I have more music-to-go than I can shake a stick at. There’s something kind of mind-boggling about having ALL OF THE SONGS on shuffle.
red paper boat 